Post by Dracula on Sept 26, 2021 18:46:23 GMT -5
The Eyes of Tammy Faye(9/26/2021)
It’s autumn: the air is getting chillier, the leaves are starting to turn… and we’re starting to have straight-up Oscar bait show up in theaters. Our first contender of the year is The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a film about the marriage of the infamous televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, who built an empire off of suckering people into donating money to people on TV who were obviously already millionaires and who are today generally looked at with disdain even by believers even as people running nearly identical hustles are as active as ever. The film was directed by Michael Showalter but really plays more like a straight biopic than like the satire you might expect and it’s hampered by not really having as much to say about its subject than you might think outside of the rather basic observation that it’s kind of jarring to see really wealthy people beg for donations in the name of Jesus. The film might frown on televangelism but it is perhaps a bit too forgiving of Tammy herself, a figure for whom the film kind of wants to have its cake and eat it too. It suggests that in her own way Faye Baker was kind of a girlboss who (literally) fought for a place at the table with the boys club of evangelism and was instrumental in building the Baker empire… but also that she was a naïve ditz who was too out of the loop to be truly responsible for the corruption that ended up bringing that same empire down. The film sticks as much to her perspective as a point of view character as possible, and given that it takes her claims of ignorance at face value this means that a lot of the juiciest corruption in this enterprise happens off screen and the film kind of assumes its audience will already know a lot of these more scandalous details, which is maybe a mistake given that this will have been before the time of a lot of viewers including myself. I can maybe understand the instinct by the filmmakers not to go straight for the jugular with this given that the Bakers probably seem like something of an easy target but the film they made feels like a dry bite lacking the needed venom to really take down the target at hand and just kind of a waste of some decent performances by people like Jessica Chastain and Vincent D'Onofrio.
**1/2 out of Five
It’s autumn: the air is getting chillier, the leaves are starting to turn… and we’re starting to have straight-up Oscar bait show up in theaters. Our first contender of the year is The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a film about the marriage of the infamous televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, who built an empire off of suckering people into donating money to people on TV who were obviously already millionaires and who are today generally looked at with disdain even by believers even as people running nearly identical hustles are as active as ever. The film was directed by Michael Showalter but really plays more like a straight biopic than like the satire you might expect and it’s hampered by not really having as much to say about its subject than you might think outside of the rather basic observation that it’s kind of jarring to see really wealthy people beg for donations in the name of Jesus. The film might frown on televangelism but it is perhaps a bit too forgiving of Tammy herself, a figure for whom the film kind of wants to have its cake and eat it too. It suggests that in her own way Faye Baker was kind of a girlboss who (literally) fought for a place at the table with the boys club of evangelism and was instrumental in building the Baker empire… but also that she was a naïve ditz who was too out of the loop to be truly responsible for the corruption that ended up bringing that same empire down. The film sticks as much to her perspective as a point of view character as possible, and given that it takes her claims of ignorance at face value this means that a lot of the juiciest corruption in this enterprise happens off screen and the film kind of assumes its audience will already know a lot of these more scandalous details, which is maybe a mistake given that this will have been before the time of a lot of viewers including myself. I can maybe understand the instinct by the filmmakers not to go straight for the jugular with this given that the Bakers probably seem like something of an easy target but the film they made feels like a dry bite lacking the needed venom to really take down the target at hand and just kind of a waste of some decent performances by people like Jessica Chastain and Vincent D'Onofrio.
**1/2 out of Five
